The actress had been a girl with him all day, giving herself to his moods, doing what he liked without demur, talking of their mutual past, telling him one amusing story after another, proving herself an ideal companion, fresh, varied, reposeful; and no one to have seen Letty Lane with the boy on that afternoon would have dreamed that she ever had known another love. They had moored their boat down near Maidenhead, and he had helped her up the bank to the little inn, where tea had been made for them, and served to him by her own beautiful white hands. He had called for strawberries, and, like a shepherd in a pastoral, had fed them to her, and as they lingered the sunset came creeping steadily in through the windows where they sat.

As they neither called for their account nor to have the tea things taken away, after a while the woman stealthily opened the door and, unknown, looked at one of the prettiest pictures ever within her walls.

Letty Lane sat on the window-seat, her golden head, her white form against the glow, and the boy by her side had his arms around her, and her head was on his breast. They were both young. They might have been white birds blown in there, nesting in the humble inn, and the woman of the house, who had not heard the waters of the Thames flow softly for nothing, judged them gently and sighed with pleasure as she shut the door.

Here at Maidenhead Dan had left his boat and the motor took them back.

Nothing spoiled his bliss that day, and he said her name a thousand times that night in his dreams. Jealousies-and, when he would let himself think, they were not one, they were many-faded away. The duties that a life with her would involve did not disturb him. For many a long year, come what might, be what would, he would recall the glowing of that sunset reflected under the inn windows, the singing of the thrushes and the flash of the white dress and the fine little white shoes which he had held in the palm of his ardent hand, which he had kissed, as he told her with all his heart that she should rest her tired feet for ever.

There grew in him that day a reverence for her, determined as he was to bring into her life by his wealth and devotion everything of good. His loving plans for her forming in his brain somewhat chaotic and very much fevered, brought him nearer than he had ever been before to the picture of his mother. His father it wasn't easy for Dan to think of in connection with the actress. He didn't dare to dwell on the subject, but he had never known his mother, and that pale ideal he could create as he would. In thinking of her he saw only tenderness for Letty Lane-only love; and in his room the night after the row on the river, the night after the long idyl in the sunset-room of the inn, something like a prayer came to his young lips, and, when its short form was finished, a smile brought it to an end as he remembered the line in Letty Lane's own opera:

"She will teach you how to pray in an Eastern form of prayer."

The ring he had given the d.u.c.h.ess of Breakwater had been her own choice, a ruby. He had asked her, through Galorey, to keep it and to wear it later, when she could think of him kindly, in an ornament of some kind or another. The d.u.c.h.ess had not refused. The ring he bought for Letty Lane, although there was no engagement announced between them, was the largest, purest diamond he could _with decency_ ask her to put on her hand! It sparkled like a great drop of clear water from some fountain on a magic continent. In another shop strands of pink coral set through with diamonds caught his fancy and he bought her yards of them, ropes of them, smiling to think how his boyhood's dreams were come true.

He never saw Ruggles except at meals, hardly spoke to the poor man at all, and the boy's absorbed face, his state of mind, made the older man feel like death. He repeated to himself that he was too late-too late, and usually wound up his reflections by ejaculating:

"Gosh almighty, I'm glad I haven't got a son!"

CHAPTER XXIV-RUGGLES' OFFER

He felt as he waited for her in that flower-filled room, for she had recovered from her distaste for flowers, as he glanced at the photographs of women like herself in costumes more or less frank, more or less vulgar, he felt as though he wanted to knock down the walls and let in a big view of the West-of Montana-of the hills. With such a setting he thought he could better talk with the lady whom he had come to see.

Ruggles held an unlighted cigar between his fingers and goose-flesh rose all over him. His gla.s.ses bothered him. He couldn't get them bright enough, though he polished them half a dozen times on his silk handkerchief. His clothes felt too large. He seemed to have shrunken. He moistened his lips, cleared his throat, tried to remember what kind of fellow he had been at Dan's age. At Dan's age he was selling a suspender patent on the road, supporting his mother and his sisters-hard work and few temptations; he was too tired and too poor.

Miss Lane kept him waiting ten minutes, and they were hours to her guest. He was afraid every minute that Dan would come in. The thoughts he had gathered together, the plan of action, disarranged itself in his mind every time he thought of the actress. He couldn't forget his vision of her on the stage or at the Carlton, where she had sat opposite them and bewitched them both. When she came into the sitting-room at length, he started so violently that he knocked over a vase of flowers, the water trickling all over the table down on to the floor.

She had dazzled him before the footlights, charmed him at dinner, and it was singular to think that he knew how this dignified, quiet creature looked in ballet clothes and in a dinner dress, whose frankness had made him catch his breath. It was a third woman who stood before Ruggles now.

He had to take her into consideration. She had expected him, saw him by appointment. She was a woman of mind and intelligence. She had not climbed to her starry position without having acquired a knowledge of men, and it was the secret of her success. She showed it in the dress in which she received her visitor. She wore a short walking skirt of heavy serge, a simple shirtwaist belted around, a sailor hat on her beautiful little head. She was unjeweled and unpainted, very pale and very sweet.

If it had not been for the marks of fatigue under her eyes, she would not have looked more than eighteen. On her left hand a single diamond, clear as water, caught the refracted light.

"How-de-do? Glad you are back again."

She gave him a big chair and sat down before him smiling. Leaning her elbows on her knees, she sank her face upon her hands and looked at him, not coquettishly in the least, but as a child might have looked. From her small feet to her golden head she was utterly charming.

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Ruggles made himself think of Dan. Miss Lane spoke slowly, nodding toward him, in her languid voice: "It's no use, Mr. Ruggles, no use."

Holding her face between her hands, her eyes gray as winter's seas and as profound, she looked at him intently; then, in a flash, she changed her position and instantly transformed her character. He saw that she was a woman, not an eighteen-year-old girl, but a woman, clever, poised, witty, understanding, and that she might have been twenty years older than the boy.

"I'm sorry you spoke so quick," he said.

"I knew," she interrupted, "just what you wanted to say from the start.

I couldn't help it, could I? I knew you would want to come and see me about it. It isn't any use. I know just what you are going to say."

"No, ma'am," he returned, "I don't believe you do-bright as you are."

Ruggles gazed thoughtfully at the cold end of his unlighted cigar. It was a comfort to him to hold it and to look at it, although not for anything in the world would he have asked to light it.

"Dan's father and me were chums. We went through pretty much together, and I know how he felt on most points. He was a man of few words, but I know he counted on me to stand By the boy."

Ruggles was so chivalrous that his role at present cost him keen discomfort.

"A lady like you," he said gently, "knows a great deal more about how things are done than either Dan or me. We ain't tenderfeet in the West, not by a long shot, but we see so few of a certain kind of picture shows that when they do come round they're likely to make us lose our minds!

You know, yourself, a circus in a town fifty miles from a railroad drives the people crazy. Now, Dan's a little like the boy with his eyes on the hole in the tent. He would commit murder to get inside and see that show." He nodded and smiled to her as though he expected her to follow his crude simile. "Now, I have seen _you_ a lot of times." And she couldn't help reminding him, "Not of your own accord, Mr. Ruggles."

"Well, I don't know," he slowly admitted; "I always felt I had my money's worth, and the night you ate with us at the Carlton I understood pretty well how the boy with his eyes at the tent hole would feel." But he tapped his broad chest with the hand that held the cigar between the first and second fingers. "I know just what kind of a heart you've got, for I waited at the stage door and I know you don't get all your applause inside the Gaiety Theater."

"Goodness," she murmured, "they make an awful fuss about nothing."

"Now," he continued, leaning forward a trifle toward her languid, half interested figure, "I just want you to think of him as a little boy.

He's only twenty-two. He knows nothing of the world. The money you give to the poor doesn't come so hard perhaps as this will. It's a big sacrifice, but I want you to let the boy go."

She smiled slightly, found her handkerchief, which was tucked up the cuff of her blouse, pressed the little bit of linen to her lips as though to steady them, then she asked abruptly:

"What has he said to you?"

"Lord!" Ruggles groaned. "_Said_ to me! My dear young lady, he is much too rude to speak. Dan sort of breathes and snorts around like a lunatic. He was dangling around that d.u.c.h.ess when I was here before, but she didn't scare me any."

And Letty Lane, now smiling at him, relieved by his break from a more intense tone, asked:

"Now, you are scared?"

"Well," Ruggles drawled, "I was pretty sure that woman didn't _care_ anything for the boy. Are you her kind?"

It was the best stroke he had made. She almost sprang up from her chair.

"Heavens," she exclaimed, "I guess I'm not!" Her face flushed.

"I had rather see a son of mine dead than married to a woman like that,"

he said.

"Why, Mr. Ruggles," she exclaimed pa.s.sionately, addressing him with interest for the first time, "what do you know about me? What? What? You have seen me dance and heard me sing."

And he interrupted her.

"Ten times, and you are a bully dancer and a bully singer, but you do other things than dance and sing. There is not a man living that would want to have his mother dress that way."

She controlled a smile. "Never mind that. People's opinions are very different about that sort of thing. You have seen me at dinner with your boy, as you call him, and you can't say that I did anything but ask him to help the poor. I haven't led Dan on. I have tried to show him just what you are making me go through now."

If she acted well and danced well, it was hard for her to talk. She was evidently under strong emotion and it needed her control not to burst into tears and lose her chance.

"Of course, I know the things you have heard. Of course, I know what is said about me"-and she stopped.

Ruggles didn't press her any further; he didn't ask her if the things were true. Looking at her as he did, watching her as he did, there was in him a feeling so new, so troubling that he found himself more anxious to protect her than to bring her to justice.